I've had the privilege of working with Adobe on a few projects, including two courses. I've been teaching since 2013 on Udemy and other similar platforms, but working with Adobe directly was an honor and I'm grateful for the opportunity. Here's the story:
Sumanth Shiva Prakash, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, sent me a message and we started talking. I was quite active on Udemy and my courses had awesome reviews - quite a lot more versus similar courses. One thing in particular stood out: I was teaching from experience as a (former) freelancer and I focused on presenting techniques that worked really well in a short amount of time. No fluff, no filler material, no showing off every single tool for the hell of it.
After speaking for a while, this course came about. Looking back at the videos, I was pretty nervous, but the course was well received, and I'm very happy for this to have been my first course for Adobe.
I started Ohvaz, my healthy food brand back in 2018, but fairly recently I expanded my line of products with some granola cereal. I designed the packaging myself and it was very well received. In fact the biggest hypermarket chain in Romania contacted me and put me on all of their shelves in their vast network of stores.
While chatting with Adobe, this came up. I basically said: I'm in love with the process of starting a blank project, doing some Photoshop magic, talking to a printing company, a buyer, then you have that product on shelves everywhere. You literally create something out of nothing. That's what triggered this packaging course.
For this course I was happy to work with Sandeep Kulkarni, Senior Product Manager at Adobe; Sean Duggan from the Learn team; and Brian Wood, a veteran in the teaching world.
At times my schedule is a bit conflicted because I'm both a designer and a business owner. Some days are spent designing sales brochures, banner ads for Meta, flyers, packaging, retouching photos; And other days are filled with hiring and managing my team at Ohvaz, signing new distribution contracts, looking for new equipment to optimize production, and so on.
Having said that, I think being on both sides of the isle make me a better teacher. I rub shoulders with tons of entrepreneurs, but I still talk to lots of designers on my Discord channel and I'm very familiar with their struggles.
Making these couple of courses for Adobe was awesome because it got to share my expertise, see how Adobe approaches a project, and chat with some lovely people.
One thing that's loosely related to Adobe - I had exams at official testing centers. I wanted to test myself and see how well I actually knew Photoshop. That's how I got my two certifications: ACE - Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and then ACI - Adobe Certified Instructor.
I don't really believe certifications help you as a designer. I think your portfolio and skills test are the most important things, but as a self-taught instructor that's teaching to loads of people, I figured this would be a great way to test myself. I'm happy I did.
